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Old 03-24-13, 09:20 PM   #11
NiHaoMike
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A couple cardboard boxes full of old electronic boards for recycling "in house", a set of drawers for storing reclaimed parts, and a whole bunch of old electronic stuff lying around (mostly out of sight but hopefully not out of mind) waiting for a use. That is in addition to the bags for paper, tin cans, etc. and a compost pile for biodegradable stuff.

BTW, I highly recommend engineers to recycle old electronics. It's a very effective cost saver (why buy a new project case when you have some lying around?) and you'll be surprised just how often you score big. (An old dual Britney motherboard might not be terribly useful today, but it did contain the high current MOSFETs I needed to build a DC/DC converter for my new PC.)

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Old 03-25-13, 05:59 PM   #12
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We (actually I) do a lot of recycling as we do not have curbside pickup. So I individually segregate glass, steel, aluminum, paper and cardboard in distinct bins.

We have a county wide recycling center and I load up the truck once a month and bring it all in.

One day, a painter was throwing away those 5 gallon large paint pails at the recycle center. I took five home, (recycled the recycle) washed them out and use them to separate different colors of glass as we have separate bins for brown, green, clear and blue glass.

Paper (mostly newspaper) goes in empty 50 lb feed bags (we live on a livestock farm) and I use several large plastic (50 gal?) tubs with lids for aluminum (mostly beer cans). If you don't cover, the smell attracts yellow jackets !

Then another 50 gallon plastic tub (with cover) for steel cans and such (same issue with bees).

Cardboard is a pain, but we don't have a lot of it.

Living on a farm, we have a huge compost pile and we put in household kitchen waste, but absolutely nothing that will attrack skunks, racoons, 'possoms. This means no bones, fat, etc. That goes in the garbage and it goes to a curbside large recepticle for weekly pickup.

An observation. My wife and I have recycled all our adult lives. We find it very curious that our younger kids do not do as we do. Maybe they will when they get a bit older. The oldest (age 30) does recycle.

Lastly, it is GREAT to throw the glass bottles into the steel recycle hopper. The smashing noise is just a great release. One day I let some young kids (7-9) do it for me and they enjoyed it more than I did! Their parents said I turned them into recyclers (or hellions at home).

Great topic.

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Old 04-05-13, 01:38 PM   #13
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In Anderson County TN I have curbside pickup. The cost is tacked on as part of the water bill. It's a one-bin system that accepts plastics (from food packaging only), metals and glass. I'm not sure what happens to it after it's picked up.

In the house we don't throw away paper, I just toss it in the woodstove. We don't take the newspaper so the volume isn't bad, mostly old mail. Toward the end of the summer the firebox is pretty full and yields a big, slow fire for about an hour and a half.

Sometimes if I see some lying around, I'll pick up old pallets, esp. from a local paint shop where the management says I can have all I can carry; they're an odd size that nobody else wants. I bring them home and cut them up, sometimes into kindling and sometimes into projects. The stringers are usually pine but the boards are often hardwood, usually poplar but sometimes oak and rarely maple (!?). That gets saved for projects.

Motor oil goes to the city oil barrel for recycling. Kitchen grease goes into the woodstove. Lawn clippings get mulched but leaves go to the curb; the city collects and mulches them in a huge heap on the edge of town.
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Old 04-08-13, 11:20 PM   #14
mejunkhound
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Everything metal has its' own stack in the back, make a trip to the junkyard every few years when I have over a ton, got $200+ for scrap steel (everything from 'tin' cans to some car doors) last time - about 2 years ago, a few hundred $$ every few years for aluminum. It helps to live on a few acres.

All the glass goes into a pit in the back, and when I need backfill for drainage the glass gets scooped out with the track hoe and moved to the drainage ditch (with a foot or so dirt on top. The grandkids love to throw the bottles and jars and 'crash' & smash them.

Plastic get put in store recycle bins, non-recyclable goes to the yearly city recycle event. The local transfer station (we cannot take stuff directly to the dump) accepts 'hazardous waste' for no fee (fluorescent light tubes mainly)

Food scraps literally get throw out the back door onto the ground. Most Everything gets eaten by the next morning, coyotes, racoons, squirrels, and the crows make short work of it all. Coffee grounds go into the garden. Possums actually eat citrus rinds, what is still on the ground the next time to mow gets thrown on the compost pile.

Anything untreated wood gets to help heat the house or the barn.

Oh, yeah, you would be surprised how misc. stuff just thrown on a pile in the summer will disappear with a 'free curb alert' ad placed on craigslist.

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